1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to wireless radio telephones and, more particularly, to radio telephones operative with a private base station in a wireless system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern cellular telephone systems currently utilize high power, frequency, time and/or code division multiplexed narrowband radio frequency communication techniques in conjunction with large cells to establish and maintain telephone communications. With the growing popularity of mobile stations configured for operating in these systems, increased flexibility in user utilization of these mobile stations is desired. One approach to providing user flexibility while encouraging greater utilization of the mobile stations is by providing low-power private base stations over which a user can register his or her mobile station and make and receive telephone calls. A private base station shares the same frequency bands with large cells, but operates at a greatly reduced power level. Also, each private base station has a land-line subscriber telephone number through which all incoming and outgoing calls are routed.
Although systems employing private base stations currently exist that can support the registration of multiple mobile stations, a call received at a private base station for any one of the mobile stations registered with this base station causes all of the mobile stations registered with the base station to be similarly alerted. While this type of operation has been generally satisfactory in the past when the likelihood was that only one or two mobile stations would be registered with a private base station at any given time, it is now technically feasible and desirable to provide a system for operation of a private base station which accommodates many more mobile stations and at the same time provides an alerting signal for a mobile station only when an incoming call is received for this station.